Google has continued to integrate blogs into their news site by extending their ‘Alerts’ service (that emails you any time any site in their new index writes on a particular keyword) to cover blogs also.
This is very cool (I should say that the ‘idea’ is cool – I’m yet to actually test it)!
I have used ‘news alerts’ for some time now as a way to find breaking news on blog niches – but now to be notified via email when blogs use those keywords opens up some great possibilities also (although the numbers of blogs writing on some keywords could lead to overwhelming numbers of alerts).
Set up alerts here where you enter the keyword/s, whether it is a blog, news or web alert (etc) and how often you want to be alerted (ie as it happens, once a day or once a week). You can have alerts arrive in your inbox either as HTML or text emails.
Thanks for this article Darren – Google Alerts is great and this is a quick way to get blog notifications without Bloglines or anything.
I agree that the idea is cool, but a couple alerts that I had set up where I was getting one or two references a day, in the last couple days I’ve been getting 150 or 200.
For certain types of info gathering though the blog news will be great. You can also chose whether or not you want to have the blog alerts added to news alerts.
I wondered why Google Alerts never covered items in my blogs. A few days ago they started to roll in. Now I know why. Thanks for the tipoff.
The best way to watch sites is to use content monitoring services like TheWebWatcher for example – you can watch RSS feeds and/or sites and you’ll get alerts faster if you know what you want to watch for + you can track RSS feeds for keywords.
I’ve subscribed to these alerts, through Google and Yahoo, for as long as I can remember. However, something strange is going on with the Google system (can’t comment on Yahoo right now).
A friend who also receives the alerts gets different citings than I receive, and we both subscribe to the same keywords. When she blogs, she receives an alert to her own post, but I don’t receive notice about her post. Again, we subscribe to the exact same keywords.
How effective can this be if all posts aren’t cited in everyone’s alert system?
SBM – It is strange how you get a selection of references with whatever term you are looking for.
What is certain is that you don’t get every post containing the term. Maybe Google “tailors” them to your likes based on what it has learned about you? Wouldn’t surprise me.
As always, Google surprises us with great new improvements
SBM, like I mentioned in my comment above you can select whether or not you want to receive the blog items. Go to manage your subscriptions and select options and make sure blog is included.
Google is becoming huge every minute
thanks for the news break Darren